Professor Peter Higgs – the British scientist who proposed the existence of a
particle that is now known as the Higgs Boson – has won the Nobel Prize in
Physics.

The greatest prize in science was awarded to the modest retired professor from Edinburgh and the Belgian scientist Francois Englert for the role they played in proposing the mechanism that explains how the most basic building blocks of the universe have mass.

Earlier this year scientists using the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, confirmed that they had found a particle that matched the theories.

It marked the culmination of 49 years of work since Professor Higgs and his colleagues first described the new type of particle.

The Nobel Prize Committee announced the award for physics after nearly an hour-long delay.

Professor Higgs himself was not available to make any comment immediately after the announcement and is said by friends to have gone away for the announcement in an attempt to avoid the spotlight.

The Nobel Committee said they had been unable to contact him to inform him that he had won the prize.

The 84-year-old is notoriously shy, preferring to emphasis the role that other scientists have played in proposing and the subsequent discovery of the Higgs Boson.

He has also admitted to being embarrassed that the particle carries his name.

A statement by Professor Higgs, who is a emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh, was placed on the university's website shortly after the announcement.

It said: "I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy.

"I would also like to congratulate all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle and to thank my family, friends and colleagues for their support.

"I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research."

Professor Higgs published a paper on the mechanism that gives subatomic particles mass in 1964 alongside with Professor Englert and another theoretical physicist Robert Brout.

Three other theoretical physicists also published on the subject later in the same year – C. R. Hagen, Gerald Gurlanik and Tom Kibble – but have not been recognised for their work with a Nobel Prize.

It had been strongly expected that Higgs would win this year's prize, and most commentators forecast that Englert would be named alongside him.

Professor Brout, who died in 2011, was ineligible because the award cannot be given posthumously.

Speaking after being told he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Professor Englert said he was "very happy" and that he was still to decide what he will do with his share of the £775,000 prize money.

He said that at first he did not think he had won due to the hour long delay before the announcement.

He said: "At first I thought I didn't have it because I didn't see the announcement."

He added that he was looking forward to congratulating Professor Higgs, who he has shared the prize with.

"He did very important and excellent work,” said Professor Englert.

Prof Englert has long argued that his paper – published two months before Higgs's work – was worthy of equal merit.

Staffan Normark, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said: “This year’s prize is about something very small that makes all the difference.

“The Swedish Academy of Science has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to François Englert... and Peter Higgs."

He said the prize was being given "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to out understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles and which was recently confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by the Atlas and CMS experiments at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider.”

The decision by the Nobel Committee will be a bitter disappointment to the Americans Hagen and Guralnik, and their British colleague Kibble, whose work was published just months afterward and is often overlooked.

Prof Hagen told The Telegraph ahead of Tuesday's announcement that he would rather nobody won the prize than it go to just some of the scientists who independently worked on the theory.

He said: "I do not need a Nobel, I am happy to go to the grave without a Nobel. I am not picky as long as the Swedes do not do anything to diminish our effort relative to the others."

The strict rules of the Nobel Prize state that it cannot be shared by more than three people, meaning the so-called "group of three" whose work came slightly later were braced for disappointment.

However, Professor Kibble, an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, said: "Our paper was unquestionably the last of the three to be published, though we naturally regard our treatment as the most thorough and complete, and it is therefore no surprise that the Swedish Academy felt unable to include us, constrained as they are by a self-imposed rule that the Prize cannot be shared by more than three people.

"My sincere congratulations go to the two Prize winners, François Englert and Peter Higgs. A sad omission from the list was Englert’s collaborator Robert Brout, now deceased."

Also overlooked were the thousands of experimental physicists on the Atlas and CMS teams at Cern, whose relentless work finally uncovered the particle last year after 50 years of searching.

In July 2012, and again earlier this year, scientists at Cern confirmed they had found a new subatomic particle that matched the properties of the Boson proposed by Higgs, Englert and Brout.

The new particle is now generally accepted by physicists and Cern itself as being called the Higgs Boson.

While the Nobel Prize will ensure Higgs’ place in history he is also now being strongly tipped to get a knighthood.

David Willetts, the science and universities minister, praised Professor Higgs and the efforts of the thousands of other scientists who have worked to search for the Higgs boson.

“We should also celebrate the efforts of the thousands of scientists and engineers all over the world who have worked on the Large Hadron Collider and the long search for the Higgs boson.”

Dr Frances Saunders, president of the Institute of Physics, said that Professor Higgs' work had led to one of the most "exciting and productive" areas of physics research.

She said: "It has been a long journey but one that has inspired a generation to engage with the subject.

"With the existence of the Higgs boson confirmed, explaining why the fundamental building blocks of nature acquire mass, we can now move on to the next challenges to our understanding such as the phenomena of dark matter and quantum gravity."

Rolf Heuer, director general at Cern, also congratulated Professors Higgs and Englert. He said: “The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN last year, which validates the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, marks the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around the world.”

Professor Paul Newman, head of the particle physics group at the University of Birmingham, added: "‘At first sight, the Higgs mechanism is a very strange idea indeed.

"It requires the entire universe, even deepest inter-galactic space, to be filled with a new field of a fundamentally different kind from anything previously known.

"The audacity of proposing such a bizarre and all-pervading mechanism based on what was known half a century ago is simply stunning.

"The confirmation of the idea through the LHC's discovery of a Higgs boson is one of the most incredible scientific stories of recent times. Recognition by the Nobel Committee is thoroughly deserved."